Alongside his work as painter, Ivan Lubennikov mainly participates in many important architectural projects in the 1980s: the Memorial monument for the Russian section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the Taganka Theater, the Mayakovsky Museum and, thirty years later, three metro stations in Moscow and the creation of “Ryaba la Poule”, a large stained glass, in the Madeleine metro station in Paris.

His painting defies any classification as it is pure visual game combining chiaroscuro, formal sleekness and extreme stylization. Ivan Lubennikov’s topics - nude, food, alcohol, Siberian landscapes - speak to the senses and elate them. Leitmotif of his work, women condense all the complexity of the artist. Enchanting or matriarchal, sensual or grotesque, they reflect his mood and the transformations in the society. His painting is a cultivated and unrestrained reinterpretation of European and Russian paintings. And it outlines implicitly the portrait of an ironical and hedonist personality as well as an attentive observer of the history of Russia.

Graduated in monumental art from the Surikov Art Institut in Moscow, Ivan Lubennikov has been awarded the highest artistic prizes of Russia. His work is part of many public and private collections: State Tretyakov Gallery, State Russian Museum, Russian Academy of Arts, Saint Petersburg, Peter Ludwig Museum…

Publications

Selected Press

The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine Viktor Kalashnikov

Ivan Leonidovich Lubennikov is a true artist of paradoxes. If viewers familiar with his very aestheticised and ironic easel paintings learn that he also created the fanciful steel structures inside or on the facades of certain buildings, they are bound to think that this fact runs counter to the laws of nature and society.